Does anyone know more information on the cellular connect the ELD is making? The only attack vector the author states is that someone from the IT department of a trucking company (or third-party management companies for these devices) could be in a position to compromise these devices, but it's only a brief paragraph.

To me, this seems like an even bigger attack service than the wifi scenario put forth by the author. Some things that come to mind are:

1) If this is exposed to the internet, then it must have a publicly-accessible IP, reachable by all internet-connected devices.

2) What type of protocol is being used to send this data back to the trucking company? Depending on the protocol, there could be open listening ports that are exploitable, or the data could be sniffed by nefarious parties.

3) Assuming it does have a publicly-accessible IP, and there are listening ports, are there safeguards in place to minimize access to these services, i.e. a firewall?

Certainly lots of unanswered questions that should be explored. Great paper OP, very interesting information.

I'm the network engineer for a Fleet telematics company, and one of our products we sell, is an ELD application. so, i'm a bit familiar with this subject.

1) "is this exposed to the internet" in our case, it's not. all of our telematics devices (not the ELD device, mind you) plug into the trucks JBUS, similar to the DS200 in OPs docs. We also sell a tablet that connects to this telematic device, and we have an application for the tablet that people can use an an ELD . All these devices are on an APN network provided by a carrier (could theoretically be AT&T, t-mobile, verizon, they all offer them), this network is on a private IP space, and these devices then route through the carrier network, over either a private link, or through an IPsec tunnel back to my data center. because they're not on the public internet, there's no accessing these devices from anywhere but my data center (and presumably, also from the providers network), additionally, the provider also offers the ability to restrict mobile-to-mobile communication, so the only thing that can talk to the devices is servers on my network. teoretically the only attack avenue is from the providers network, or my data centers network. hopefully my firewalls prevent any real shenanigans there....

2) depends on the application and how the software was developed. at our company, we have a mix of custom written UDP protocols (blegh), and APIs that communicate over https, usually uploading JSON payloads. (ideally, this all transitiions to https). for the most part, all these protocols communicate outbound only, so the devices don't just have open ports.

3) like i stated, all our devices are on a private network. i would assume this is the case for many others as well. any place that sells an application/device that connects over the public internet, better have a complete lock-down of their device so that it doesn't allow a single packet inbound... but who knows...

The quick change part is the part that hasn’t lasted very long. I just saw a review not to use it with impact drivers, so maybe that is my problem, the the package says they can be used with impact drivers. The actual drill bits have held up and I really like the countersink feature.

Learn to sharpen your drill bits, and get a good HSS set of bits. Dont but any fancy coated titanium BS bits, that coating wears off. Any drill bit will wear and dull after time. Just like a kitchen knife, you need to learn to sharpen them to keep them in proper condition. Also run them at the right speed. This is usually slower than you might think, and requires some machinist knowledge to get perfect, but there are lots of YouTube vids on the subject

As an approach shoe it laces down to the toes which gives you options when you lace up. can leave it a little looser around your toe box, give yourself some room all the way if youre at a desk, tighten it all up for walking. They are also a heavier duty shoe than your average tennis shoe, and the sole is very supportive. My first pair had a seam tear, i sent it back and they replaced them for free. Ive since had that replacement pair for a couple years with heavy wear and they have lasted very well.
A note on vibram soles too, I believe that they come in various levels of hardness based on what the shoe is intended to do, so some will be softer than others. At least, thats what I was told by a dude in a shoe store, I honestly havent done any research to back it up, but if youre in the market for serious shoes its probably worth looking into all the details. Oboz are also great and have a wider last (toebox basically) for ppl with wider feet.

Yea, small sample here, but my last 2 shoes vibram soles, and they were pretty vastly different, one was hard and long lasting, yet super slick on wet surfaces, and the other was more medium and hasn't lasted nearly as long, but I have less issues with wet metal grates.

Media converters? If these cables are being run for ethernet, they're either 1Gbps or 10Gbps ethernet. If they're 1Gbps, cat 7 is ridiculous overkill and a waste of money. If they're being run for 10Gbps, they'll be using NICs with SFP ports, and 10GBase-SR transceivers are cheaper than 10Gbase-T transceivers.

New Relic. I was against giving up my Nagios servers at first, and some of the services they offer are quite pricey, but it's so much better than when we managed our own monitoring systems.

They're in multiple datacenters, and we can have alerting come in totally independent of any of our servers, networks or mail systems.

We have the New Relic server client baked in to our system images, and depending on if a hostname has "production" in it or not it automatically sets a different alerting group. This way we can auto-scale to add/remove ephemeral servers and have them automatically get monitored. Doing the automation for all that with Nagios was doable, but very ugly. With New Relic it just works and we don't have to spend time managing it or monitoring our monitoring system.

I believe their server monitoring (cpu, disk space, network I/O, etc) is free. Synthetic web/api tests, and application performance monitoring are expensive, but well worth the money if you can afford it.

Well, i'm not going to say that the way we have things setup is the right way, because it's all dependant on you... but what my shop does is that we have a central LDAP for authentication on all servers(i believe we currently use openldap), and we use puppet to push out each users ssh public keys (and various .rc files) to the servers. this allows users who have a ldap account to get to the servers, but then makes them figure out and have experience with our puppet config to get nice things like pub key auth across the farm.

seems to work fairly well for us.

One interesting thing to keep in mind with this kinda thing, is that this means we have a completely separate authentication methods between LDAP and AD. on one hand this is great to keep the random sales, marketing, etc. guys away from the production network, on the other hand, this makes it a lot more complicated for dev's to work, because they all have 2 logins/passwords/etc. also one bonus to this setup to keep in mind, is that in a disaster recovery type scenario, we don't need to worry about DC's, windows servers, AD, or anything like that in order to recover the business critical applications.

I'm using sophos in HA for 6 sites, works well enough for me, firewall, HA, dhcp, DNS, VPN, endpoint etc all work pretty great. The only problem I've had with them is things like more advanced OSPF configs, and a few other things that I should be using a real router for. My #1 advice for managing multiple UTMs is to setup and configure them all though their SUM (sophos UTM manager), makes having a consistence experience, firewall rules, etcc all better and much easier with it.

Also, my experience with them is on the UTM products, the XG products are a bit different and I haven't had a chance to give them a try yet

Depends on your goals, of you are trying to pass the ccna, I'd work on subnetting, and basics of tcpip and osi model, these things are kinda boring though, so feel free to just go dig into the book with whatever part sounds most interesting. The more pieces of the puzzle you have leading into the class, the easier it is to make the picture. See if you can get Cisco packet tracer setup and dig into that. It's wwaaaayy easier than any other method using GNS3, or any other virtualized router things that I've ever seen.

We don't have the people, environment nor the processes for a test environment for all patches. We're government too, so we need to be somewhat compliant, so patches get deployed pretty much at release time, with the only exception being if I see headlines about a particular patch.

Windows Update rebooting our servers without consent is a bad one aswell. No GPO or registry hack in the world can prevent it apparantly, and it kills some of our Server 2008 R2's by getting them stuck in Shutting Down overnight, with only a forced reboot to fix it.

Would I ever consider delaying patching? No. Should we implement proper patch management instead of just winging it with default WSUS? Yes, but I'm just a junior, and the seniors think it's fine because they know it.

Windows Update rebooting our servers without consent is a bad one aswell. No GPO or registry hack in the world can prevent it apparantly, and it kills some of our Server 2008 R2's by getting them stuck in Shutting Down overnight, with only a forced reboot to fix it.

SCCM.
also, monitoring systems will tell you if they are stuck during the reboot.

the silence from users who don't even bother to let you know there is an issue.

i had this the other day

it was literally also the "you know the <insert important thing here> is down, right?"

no, i was completely unaware, as you can see, i'm carring a 10' around, and i'm obviously trying to fix this IP camera that's pointed straight at the wall. i wasn't anywhere near my phone, monitoring system, or anything else to tell me that the phone system went out completely for the whole building. thanks for telling me though!

Yeah this is in my desktop, so you can at least double the amount of days it's actually been in the machine. Plus lets not forget that server grade hardware is rated for always-on operation while consumer disks aren't. This disk has been thrashing like a madman for at least a year, but still it's kept on going.

i am the main IT guy for a small business with maybe 40 or so meraki AP's across 5 sites.

they're great. some of the features they have are a life saver. one time, there was an unintended change at a site, where we had to change the network range and gateway IP. most clients were on dhcp, and worked great, however, the AP's had been setup static, the meraki's were smart enough to figure that out, and failback to DHCP to talk to thier cloud service. our wifi networks still worked, i was able to go into the cloud service, and put them back on an IP range that i wanted them on. neat service.

long shot, but i've had wierd problems when local users and groups aren't in order. such as having the 'interactive' account removed from the local users groups. that just messed things up for weeks before we caught it.